neat stem project

I wanted a STEM project for my daughter and I to do together. I also wanted to introduce her to coding and programming a robot. I purchased this building block remote controlled robot for her. I liked that she was already familiar with assembling these types of block and thought that she would like it. The kit comes with bags of parts labeled 1-5, a remote, a base mechanical block with charger, an assembly instruction booklet and a pamphlet about operating the robot and controller. The assembly instruction booklet has pictures showing you what the parts look like and how they go together. It does not tell in the booklet when to switch bags so I found that I still had pieces left over from the first bag while I had to move on to opening the second bag and so on. I was using pieces from the number one bag long after having opened all the other bags. It would have been much easier if I were able to use up all the pieces in a particular bag before opening any other bag of parts. I found myself having to dig through a mountain of pieces to find what I was looking for.

It took us approximately 3 hours to assembly this robot. We made sure that we had 2 fresh AAA batteries (not included) for the remote and that the base block was fully charged. We were not able to get the remote to connect with the robot and only got blinking lights on the two. Next, I attempted to download the app via scanning the QR code in the booklet and on the box. It did not work and only opened a blank document file. I searched the app store and was able to find the app. I installed the app and connected to the robot via Bluetooth. The robot would not move but would only make a grinding noise. After many unsuccessful attempts, I contacted the seller with my issues and am waiting on a response. My daughter and I did get very frustrated with this robot because it come apart very easily and it was quite difficult to assemble. I may be returning this product if I cannot get it to function properly.

UPDATE: The seller suggested sending it back to get a replacement but we hated that we would have wasted so much time and effort putting it together. I called a friend of ours would work with things like this and he came over to help. We finally got the robot to function after the friend helped us. It works great now. Some of the features on the app do not function such as the voice command option (app store user reviews stated that they experienced the same issuesas us) and their is no clear direction as to how to use some of the features or how to code the robot.